I finished an English series on the way I think ordinary people can start using AI for real work. The point is not to become an AI expert first. The point is to have one place where you can say what you want, give the tool access to the right folder, and check the result. Anything important still needs a human pause: publishing, deleting, paying, or authorizing. My preferred starting point is simp
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) has become the default standard for connecting AI agents to external tools and APIs. Governed by the Linux Foundation since early 2025 and adopted by OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, and Vercel, MCP is the USB-C port of the AI ecosystem — one protocol that lets any LLM application talk to any tool server. But there's a gap between reading the spec and building somethi
If you have spent any real time with Claude Code, you have probably noticed the same problem I did. You write the same instructions in the prompt every other day. "Use four-space indentation here." "Always run the linter after edits." "Format commit messages this way." After the third or fourth repeat, it stops feeling like a prompt and starts feeling like missing config. Skills are how Claude Cod
“Distributed systems” is a commonly used concept today. Perhaps the first time you read it it sounds daunting, and while there are plenty of challenges, the concept itself is simple and it might even give you more clarity when it comes to building this kind of system. Let’s start from… the beginning. When software went from being a possibility to being a reality (a virtual one, of course), things
SQLite Internals & PostgreSQL Multi-Master Replication Updates Today's Highlights This week's database highlights include critical technical discussions from the SQLite forum regarding optimizer behavior and trigger affinity changes, alongside the release of Spock 5.0.7, bringing enhanced logical multi-master replication to PostgreSQL. Source: https://sqlite.org/forum/info/819f2d6627c
Adding email and calendar tools to an AI agent is mostly an exercise in restraint. Give it 50 commands and the agent gets confused. Give it 5 carefully-chosen ones and it punches above its weight. After running agents against the Nylas CLI for a few months, these are the five I keep coming back to. Each gets exposed via MCP (nylas mcp install) so the agent can call them directly. nylas email send
You ssh'd into a fresh Linux box and you need to send an email. Maybe a backup completed. Maybe a deploy succeeded. Maybe a process crashed and you want a stack trace in your inbox. The traditional path: install Postfix, edit main.cf, configure a smart relay, generate SASL credentials, restart the daemon, and pray nothing else on the box uses port 25. That is the 30-minute path. The 60-second path
Your password-reset flow needs an inbox to test against. Your invitation flow too. Your email-verification gate too. The classic setup is a "[email protected]" alias on a shared mailbox, polling Gmail's API, hoping nothing else lands while the test runs. It is fragile, it leaks state across PRs, and your credentials live in CI. A managed agent account flips this. Each PR gets a fresh inb